Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Baroness Thornton Excerpts

Friday 14th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

My Lords, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Shamash. The noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, speaks with enormous authority based on enormous experience, but we are considering an amendment which seeks to replace “capacity” with “ability”. As Clause 3 of the Bill makes very clear, “capacity” is the term used because there is a well-established, tried and tested scheme under the Mental Capacity Act 2005.

By contrast, the word “ability”, which the noble Baroness seeks to insert, is inherently uncertain; it has no defined legal meaning. There are later amendments to this Bill, to Clause 3, which do seek to address the concept of capacity in the context of this Bill. They are very important amendments and I look forward to our debates on them—but to insert “ability” as the governing concept would simply cause confusion.

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, I absolutely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Pannick. The noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, and I have worked together for many years, on many health issues, but I do not think she addressed the issue of why she wants to change the wording.

Given that we worked in 2005 on the Bill that actually put capacity into the legislation, I would be interested to know what her reasoning is. I think that is particularly important because the noble Baroness did not address the issue of choice. Of course, ability, capacity and choice are central to this Bill. I wonder why the committee whose report we have before us did not take any evidence at all from terminally ill people who need to make the choice in this matter. I think that was a grave mistake on its part and that if it had, that possibly would have led the noble Baroness to take a different view.

[Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)]

My Lords, I was a member of the committee. The committee noted that we did not take evidence from terminally ill people. That was not a decision that we took as a committee. Suggestions were made and the clerks did not, in the end, manage to provide us with witnesses who were terminally ill, but it was not a decision that was formally taken. I agree that, had we taken evidence from—

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Scotland of Asthal (Lab)]

We were very grateful to receive evidence from New Zealand, and we heard from a practitioner about the challenges and the opportunities that there are. But we also heard that New Zealand had moved from being the third most successful in delivering palliative care to the 12th, and there was a direct correlation, we were told, between the reduction in the investment in palliative care and the existence of the new service. These are the realities, and there are many who have said that if there is to be a real choice—if I can just finish this sentence, I would be grateful—then the choice has to include a fully funded palliative care service to enable people to choose whether that is the course they want to go down, or another. Without that, the choice is not a real one.

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

Would my noble and learned friend care to tell the House which other countries the committee took evidence from?

[Baroness Scotland of Asthal (Lab)]

The difficulty we had was of course with time. We did not take a lot of evidence. The Committee will know that there was a request that we should take written evidence. It would have been possible for us to take written evidence from a number of jurisdictions, which could then have formed a body of evidence that could have been looked at. The decision was made by the committee that we should not take written evidence—so I think the committee was constrained in terms of what it could do and the timing. The committee tried to do its best. I hope that this House will not deny itself the opportunity of looking at evidence from other jurisdictions; we will all be able to talk about that in due course.